Big Data News – 08 Sep 2016

A panel set up by Obama’s Cancer Moonshot program says we should make better use of existing research data. “Reuse, and recycle” is a famous saying of the environmental movement, but cancer researchers might learn a thing or two from that mantra as well.

Cloud-based filesharing, collaboration and social networking applications are common vectors for malware infections, a large portion of of which are ransomware delivery vehicles, according to a report released today. Javascript exploits and droppers, Microsoft Office macros, and PDF exploits make up 43.7 percent of the total detected cloud malware, said Jamie Barnett, CMO at Netskope, the company that released the report. "These are typical ransomware delivery vehicles," she said. Cloud-based applications such as Dropbox can be used to spread malware in a couple of different ways. Attackers can upload the infected files to the cloud service, then share them with victims. Since there are many legitimate users of these services, they are not typically blocked by enterprises.

In his session at Things Expo, Kausik Sridharabalan, founder and CTO of Pulzze Systems, Inc., will focus on key challenges in building an Internet of Things solution infrastructure. He will shed light on efficient ways of defining interactions within IoT solutions, leading to cost and time reduction. He will also introduce ways to handle data and how one can develop IoT solutions that are lean, flexible and configurable, thus making IoT infrastructure agile and scalable.

Real-time monitoring and Internet of Things technologies yield the highest return on investments for high-value goods like vaccines or commodities with high loss rates

The value of big data can't be overstated for businesses nowadays. The collection and analysis of data has allowed thousands of businesses to make decisions that are driven by that data, lending their decisions more weight and credibility — and even predicting the future with machine-learning.

Barracuda Networks this week unveiled a new version of an appliance that makes it simpler to back data up both locally and into the cloud.

The contributed article by Linda Gimmeson addresses the situation where you're having trouble proving that your big data project is producing positive business outcomes, by providing some strategies to help you more effectively communicate the value of your data to the CEO and CFO

In this special guest feature, Chris Monberg, President and CTO of Boomtrain, discusses some ways to demystify AI to the C-suite in order to get over the feeling that AI is overwhelming and inaccessible and see how it can actually be quite valuable when used in the right context.

First the news: HPE, the relatively new company that itself was the creation of the cleaving of Hewlett-Packard's printer and other businesses, is undergoing yet another change. After a series of HPE divestments, the company announced yesterday that it is planning on spinning off its "non-core" software assets and merging them with Micro Focus. In terms of the structure, HPE will receive $2.5 billion in cash and its shareholders will own 50.1% of the new company, in a deal which is valued at $8.8 billion. HPE's somewhat embattled CEO, Meg Whitman, is saying that the deal is an "important step" and part of HPE's strategy to "unlock a faster growing, higher margin, stronger cash flow company." Well, she would say that.

MapR Technologies today announced that Matt Mills will take over the CEO position for John Schroder, who will remain with the company he founded seven years ago as executive chairman. In a conversation with Datanami, Schroeder and Mills describe what the changing of the guard signifies, and whether it will impact MapR's strategy. Mills previously ran a $4.5-billion division of Oracle (NYSE: ORCL) before joining MapR last year as president and COO. While MapR is several orders of magnitude smaller than Oracle, Mill's experience managing 8,000 salespeople will help him guide MapR through the next stage of its growth, or what Schroeder is calling "hypergrowth."

As a Marketer or Customer Engagement professional, imagine the cost-savings if you knew who in your database or lead list were likely to be the most profitable customers or most likely to respond? Would you bother mailing a list of a million contacts if you knew that only 100,000 of those contacts were "worthy" of your campaign and very likely to respond? Innovation is not necessarily the invention of something new, but be the result of finding a new use for an existing product, service, methodology or practice. Take the use of scorecards in Marketing.

Cybersecurity is top of mind for security professionals across both the public and private sector, with the federal government alone in 2015 experiencing more than 60,000 cybersecurity breaches. Cyber breaches expose potentially sensitive information and can adversely impact both personal lives as well as materially impact businesses, all while costing organizations millions of dollars. It's thus more important than ever that federal agencies seek new technologies to address cybersecurity as part of their overall big data strategy, and a multitude of factors have put Apache Hadoop at the forefront of cybersecurity strategy.

Our walls of security prevention are actually being surmounted every day — we just don't always know it. Assaults from within the network, as well as zero-day threats, are driving new types of solutions referred to as "advanced threat detection" (ATD). ATD brings in real-time packet capture and analysis in addition to monitoring of logs and NetFlow information, as well as recording of packet capture data for near-real-time and post-analysis. By analyzing data traffic, it is possible to build a profile of normal network behavior that can then be compared against real-time data or recorded data to detect anomalies. Alerts can be compared against security prevention solution data to assess if an attack is underway. Conversely, it can be used to determine "false positives."

Hewlett Packard Enterprise will spin off and merge what it considers its non-core software assets with U.K.-based enterprise software firm Micro Focus in a deal worth $8.8 billion, the company said Wednesday. Included in the bundle being offloaded are HPE's businesses focusing on application delivery management, big data, enterprise security, information management and governance, and IT operations management. Combined with Micro Focus, which acquired Attachmate in 2014 and owns Linux company SUSE, it will create one of the world's largest pure-play software companies, HPE said, with a combined sales force of about 4,000 people.

'Eat your own dog food' and 'practice what you preach'. I love these sayings and I strongly support the idea behind them. If you believe in something, prove it. In the world of data and analytics, we've been able to ignore this wisdom for a long time. The time for change has come though! We are going to analyze the analytics. In fact, understanding how data is used and what kind of analysis is done might just become a key capability in successfully utilizing company data. Of course, analytics have been the subject of analysis for a long time now.

When building DevOps or continuous delivery practices you can learn a great deal from others. What choices did they make, what practices did they put in place, and how did they connect the dots? At Sonatype, we pulled together a set of 21 reference architectures for folks building continuous delivery and DevOps practices using Docker. Why? After 3,000 DevOps professionals attended our webinar on "Continuous Integration using Docker" discussing just one reference architecture example, we recognized there was a strong interest in the community to learn more.

Woodard & Curran is a $200 million integrated engineering, science, and operations company based in Portland, Maine, but has offices scattered across the country. Kenneth Danila, Director of Information Systems, recently helped migrate the company to a cloud based storage system from Panzura to eliminate long delays in sharing huge engineering files, and that shift enabled the company to swap out its expensive MPLS network.

Yahoo today announced that it's open sourcing Pulsar, a new distributed "publish and subscribe" messaging systems designed to be highly scalable while maintaining low levels of latency. The bus already backs some of Yahoo's key apps, and now the Web giant is seeking the help of the open source community to take Pulsar to the next level. In a post to the Yahoo Engineering blog, Yahoo developers Joe Francis and Matteo Merli explained the application requirements that spurred the creation of the new "pub-sub" messaging system that would become Pulsar.

Wearing a bright red hat embroidered with "Make Software Great Again," Box CEO Aaron Levie took the stage at the BoxWorks customer conference on Wednesday to serve as emcee for the unveiling of massive redesigns and upgrades to the company's cloud storage and content services products.  Box's web interface is getting a complete redesign, with new organization, search and preview capabilities. The company is launching a new desktop app to help Windows and Mac users access their files.

The Internet of Things can drive efficiency for airlines and airports. In their session at Things Expo, Shyam Varan Nath, Principal Architect with GE, and Sudip Majumder, senior director of development at Oracle, will discuss the technical details of the connected airline baggage and related social media solutions. These IoT applications will enhance travelers' journey experience and drive efficiency for the airlines and the airports. The session will include a working demo and a technical deep dive into the solution delivered via the IoT Cloud platform.

People, business and objects are being networked and connected at a dizzying pace. This digital transformation is not only radically disrupting the economy, it's fundamentally changing the way finance operates. The new digital economy moves fast, and finance departments need real-time access to data and instant insights to help their companies weather the digital storm…

Carrier Ethernet is a potent and increasingly important tool as overall bandwidth demand and the need for flexibility both increase.

Incorporating a data-centric security approach will help alleviate the burden breaches place on the organization and people's lives.

The FAA new rules, or Part 107, were met with a collective sigh of relief and even cheers by the drone industry.

With the advent of the internet age, controlling your personal data rapidly became impractical without cutting both internet and mobile cords. As internet of things (IoT) and big data technologies proliferate, the ways your data can be collected and processed are expanding even more quickly. And that, potentially, puts users, government and business on a collision course where privacy is concerned. Getting your arms around privacy in the digital age is no simple feat.

Oracle will acquire LogFire, a provider of cloud-based warehouse management applications, with the aim of boosting the features of its supply chain management cloud offering. The Redwood Shores, Calif. software and cloud giant expects that adding the LogFire applications will complement the logistics functionality of its Oracle Supply Chain Management (SCM) Cloud by adding warehouse management capabilities. The financial terms of the proposed acquisition of the Atlanta, Georgia, firm were not disclosed.

GigaSpaces, a provider of in-memory computing (IMC) technologies, launched InsightEdge, a data grid-enabled real-time analytics platform that incorporates Apache Spark to dramatically enhance fast data analytics.

To be effective as salespeople, service staff needs access to the same software the sales staff are using to construct price quotes.

(Insider Story)

It's September, and the start of our new season of SAP conferences. But you knew that already,  I suspect. But perhaps what you don't know (yet) is the excellent crop of enterprise performance management (EPM); governance, risk and compliance (GRC); and security content that's been harvested and will be waiting for you to graze upon…

Readers would be amazed at how much effort large technology vendors go to in order to woo young startups to their platforms. Amazon Web Services, Google, Microsoft, Rackspace — they all have significant initiatives aimed at getting startups on board early. The theory goes that if you get one of these companies at the start, you're more likely to have it for life.

Take a satellite image, and extract the pixels into a uniform 3-D color space. Then run a clustering algorithm on those pixels, to extract a number of clusters. The centroids of those clusters them make a representative palette of the image.

You may have seen our invite to join the genomics consortium Let me recap a little about what this is about and catch you up to speed on our progress and next steps. Hortonworks is quarterbacking a consortium of leading healthcare organizations and subject matter experts to help develop the platform requirements for next generation…

The best approach to containing shadow IT is to offer users a viable option to provision adequate resources within an approved, scalable ecosystem.

Data lineage is an important aspect of establishing trust, and not just for compliance purposes. Things continue to be very busy for the Cloudera Navigator team! Just a few weeks ago, as part of the Cloudera Enterprise 5.8 release, we shipped Cloudera Navigator 2.7. In this new series of blog posts, we'll take a look at some of the newest features we've shipped over the past few releases of Cloudera Navigator.

Between the mockups and specs produced by analysts, and resulting applications built by developers, there exists a gulf where projects fail, costs spiral, and applications disappoint. Methodologies like Agile attempt to address this with intensified communication, with partial success but many limitations.

Although it has gained significant traction in the consumer space, IoT is still in the early stages of adoption in enterprises environments. However, many companies are working on initiatives like Industry 4.0 that includes IoT as one of the key disruptive technologies expected to reshape businesses of tomorrow. The key challenges will be availability, robustness and reliability of networks that connect devices in a business environment. Software Defined Wide Area Network (SD-WAN) is expected to play a key role in overcoming these challenges.

By becoming citizen data scientists, business users are more invested in the data discovery process as they're given the tools for performing deep analysis.

Macroeconomic theories of growth and wealth distribution have an outsized influence on national and international social and economic policies. Yet, due to a relative lack of reliable, system wide data, many s…